Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  His job was to kill a mad dog without getting bit—but it didn’t help much when he thought of the possibility of meeting a German icebreaker with eight-inch guns. The whole world was mad when one came right down to it, and the only good part of life was illegal sex.

  Two days after they had left Angmagssalik, Paul took dawn star sights, was happy to find that they placed him in a tiny triangle exactly like that drawn in the textbooks, and went back to his bunk. He had just fallen into a state in which his memories of his few hours in the little cabin of Brit’s ketch merged with dreams when Nathan called him.

  “Skipper,” Nathan said, “we see something ahead, looks like a boat—”

  Paul jumped from his bunk and ran to the bridge. The sea was as calm and blue as Long Island Sound in summer, and the October sunshine was surprisingly warm. In the distance to his left the ice pack glittered, and a large ice castle was a mile off the starboard bow with smaller bergs scattered in a circle around them. At first this is all he saw.

  “One point off the port bow, sir,” Guns said. “About halfway to the horizon. I think it’s a lifeboat.”

  Paul adjusted his binoculars and finally he saw it, not much more than a black speck on the sapphire sea. It could be a lifeboat, a very small ship or the conning tower of a submarine.

  “Sound general quarters,” Paul said. “I want all guns manned and loaded.”

  “Can I turn on the radar?” Nathan asked.

  “Yes. Track it. See if it’s moving, however slowly. Seth, take visual bearings.”

  The klaxon horn honked with ridiculous urgency for so pleasant a morning. The men scrambled to their guns.

  “Hell, we’s going to get us a lifeboat,” Guns said.

  “The object is five point eight miles, bearing three five one,” Nathan said, opening a pilothouse window. “I believe it’s stationary, and I do not believe it’s a steel vessel. It’s very small.”

  Probably it is a lifeboat, Paul thought. With all those ships being sunk out in the Atlantic, a few would be bound to drift this way. The object seemed to rock slightly in the calm sea. A lifeboat, almost certainly.

  “We haven’t seen any signals from it,” a lookout called from the flying bridge. “Shall I try to raise someone on blinker?”

  “No.” The thought occurred to Paul that a drifting lifeboat might be some sort of trap. Perhaps his imagination was overactive, but some smart German might leave a boat in an open stretch of sea, hide behind the nearest iceberg and wait for a ship with a captain sucker enough to stop and pick it up. If the Kraut had seen the Arluk coming, he might have had time to arrange that. Or the lifeboat could be booby-trapped. It could be loaded with explosives—or with dying sailors too weak to signal.

  I’ll have to come close enough to inspect it, try not to take any unnecessary chances, Paul decided. “Come right slowly,” he said. “I’m going to circle around all those icebergs just to make sure we’re alone out here. Then I’ll approach to within about half a mile of whatever that is up there and let our whaleboat go in to make a close inspection.”

  The crew, Paul was sure, thought he was crazy as he methodically toured all nearby icebergs, like a child looking behind bushes in a game of hide and seek. No German ship was in evidence. Turning finally toward the small dark object, Paul approached close enough to make sure that it was a lifeboat. Through his binoculars he could see a standard gray double-ended hull. It could be empty, full of corpses or men too weak to sit or stand. As he approached to within half a mile and slowed, Paul saw that some objects were lashed around the sides of the boat, dark blobs that made no sense at all, but maybe they were life preservers tied there to give more stability. The boat was very low in the water. It could be heavily laden with explosives or it could be half flooded.

  “All right, lower the whaleboat,” Paul said as the Arluk glided to a standstill. “Boats, take two men armed with automatic rifles. Don’t touch that damned boat—it could be booby-trapped. Just go close enough to see what’s there.”

  The crew lowered the whaleboat smartly and Guns provided the rifles with clips. As soon as the whaleboat pulled away, Paul got the Arluk moving in a broad circle. Eight knots was not fast, but it was better than presenting a stationary target, and excessive precautions were better than sitting there fat and dumb.

  The whaleboat slowed as it neared the lifeboat, chugged slowly around it at a distance of only about thirty feet and headed back toward the Arluk, which stopped her engine. Boats was standing in the stern.

  As he came near he called, “They’re all dead. It’s full of decomposed bodies, some in lifejackets lashed all around the gun’lls—”

  In his mind’s eye Paul could see the lifeboat pulling away from a sinking vessel, maybe a troopship. The boat was full and the sea was swarming with men trying to get into it. They had lashed as many as they could to the gun’lls, and had all waited there dumbly hoping for rescue while they froze to death.

  “Skipper, pass us a can of gasoline,” Boats said. “We’ll douse the bodies and we can set it off with the twenties.”

  “Could we read a funeral service or something?” Williams asked.

  “No,” Paul said. “We’re setting no fires.”

  “You’re just going to leave them here?” Nathan asked.

  “You could see the smoke from a fire for thirty miles at least.”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” Nathan said.

  “Could we give them a burial at sea, wrap them in flags or something?” Williams said.

  “We’ll take no decomposed bodies aboard here—”

  “Skipper …”

  “If I were dead I wouldn’t want to do that to a ship’s crew,” Paul said. “Now get that whaleboat aboard and let’s get out of here.”

  No one talked as they brought the whaleboat aboard.

  “Captain,” Williams said, “could we at least read some kind of a service over them?”

  “I don’t have any service—”

  “Any Bible—”

  “I don’t have a Bible and I doubt if any man in the crew does.”

  “I have one,” Williams said. “Can I read from it?”

  “You can if you make it fast,” Paul said. “Don’t ask me to stop the ship.”

  Williams went to the wardroom and soon appeared with a black book in his hand. Standing on the fantail he read something as the Arluk passed the lifeboat, but the rumble of the screw made his quavering voice impossible to understand. The men stood hatless except for Boats, who faced the lifeboat and held a salute for thirty seconds. When Williams stopped reading, he ducked into the wardroom with his book, and the men off watch went to the forecastle for coffee.

  “Could we sink the boat with gunfire?” Nathan asked.

  “You can hear gunfire for twenty miles.”

  Boats came to stand on the bridge beside them. He was shivering when he said, “Sharks got the legs of the people in the water and seagulls were pecking at the eyes of the men in the boat. There wasn’t a hell of a lot left to burn.”

  “They’re dead, Boats,” Paul found himself shouting. “Do you think they’d be happier in some damn bronze coffin in a churchyard?”

  “No.”

  “Let the dead bury the dead,” Paul said. “That much of the Bible I remember. Our job is to stay alive.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Did you get the name of the ship that boat was from?” Paul suddenly asked.

  “The S.S. Garden City out of New York.”

  “Log it. Nathan, give him the position. And don’t send any radio reports about it until you can tack it on the end of something you damned well have to send.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Boats, pick a shore party of twelve men who can handle rifles without shooting themelves. When we get to Scoresbysund, I’m not going to have any damned Danes telling me what I can do ashore—I’m going to search every settlement.”

  “Aye, aye sir.”

  “And don’t
make Guns part of that shore party. We’re going ashore to look for radio transmitters, not to get laid … Tell yourself that too, captain … Nathan, tell Chief Banes to give us all the RPM he safely can. I want to get to Scoresbysund while this weather holds. Let’s get on with it.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Scoresbysund turned out to be a vast almost landlocked sound, full of bays, islands and winding fjords. It was surprisingly free of ice and the smooth red granite mountains around it looked oddly warm in the short but sunny last days of October. The glittering ice of glaciers that pressed to the sea between the mountains, the odd indigo color of the water and the spectacular blazes of color at sunrise and sunset created breath-taking scenery, but the endless maze of ice, rock and water was a nightmare for anyone looking for a German weather station. The settlement there was about twice the size of the one at Angmagssalik, with similar wooden cottages and sod huts. The dozen or so Danes that Paul found were all old, but unlike the people at Angmagssalik, almost embarrassingly eager to help in any search for Germans. Paul felt ridiculous as with the aid of an armed shore party of twelve men he searched tiny attics and clothes closets in search of radio transmitters.

  “Hell, any damned German would bury his equipment in the snow long before we got ashore,” Paul said to Nathan. “If they have a weather station in any of these damn fjords it would be in a sod hut covered with snow. They wouldn’t even have to have a radio tower. They could rig a damn aerial to the side of a mountain and take it down when they saw us coming.”

  “They’d have to get supplies,” Nathan said wearily.

  For two weeks they explored Scoresbysund. When Nathan was not on the bridge he sat hunched over his radio equipment. No signals came from the immediate vicinity, but on high frequencies he often picked up scraps of code which might have skipped from almost anywhere.

  They visited two small Eskimo settlements in Scoresbysund in addition to the main one. Here the natives lived in sod huts hardly bigger than dog kennels. They appeared childlike, eager to please and ultimately inscrutable. Regardless of what they had heard about the Germans, Paul was sure that they would help any white man who arrived with a few boxes of sugar, booze and canned meat, or even if he had nothing to offer them but a smile. Apparently the Eskimos really did love everyone, but these had been told not to fornicate with sailors. When the men in Paul’s shore party gave them gifts of tea and Spam and kept repeating the word, “ping-ping,” the Eskimos giggled, laughed, shook their heads and retreated en masse into their huts.

  Soon everyone aboard the Arluk felt completely frustrated, and no one was sorry when Commander GreenPat ordered the ship to go back to patrolling the coast. More radio activity had been picked up near Cape Farewell, and the Arluk was told to steam south.

  Just as the pilotbook had warned, November marked the beginning of the Greenland winter. On October 30, low-scudding gray clouds wiped out the last scrap of blue sky, a northwesterly wind began to howl and the temperature took an abrupt dive to forty below zero. The only good part of this situation was that the northwesterly wind moved the ice pack a few miles off shore, leaving a sheltered belt of sea at the foot of the mountains in which the Arluk could maintain full speed. Although the clouds obscured the moon and stars, there was an eerie glow caused by the surrounding ice reflecting the slightest amount of light. The long Arctic nights were not as black as Paul had feared. With the radar turned on every hour long enough to give brief glimpses of the surrounding terrain and icescape, Paul found his job of navigation surprisingly easy.

  As the ship approached Angmagssalik, Paul could not help but start toying with the idea of stopping there to see Brit. Any number of excuses could be found—he could tell Commander GreenPat that he had to put in to find a quiet spot for engine repairs, or that they were receiving more radio signals which needed investigation. For such deceptions the cooperation of the entire crew would be needed, however, and that he would not get in a port where the men were not allowed ashore. From reports of the crew of the whaleboat, the men had learned that Paul had met a Danish woman, and though neither he nor Nathan had said anything about it, they had accurately guessed why he had disappeared for three hours. If he brought the ship back to Angmagssalik without orders, their genial envy would turn to scorn, with even the possibility of official complaints from a few when they got back to the base. And although those could be handled, there was a certain code which even men like Mowrey would not break. Commanding officers were not supposed to run Coast Guard cutters like yachts, stopping at any port where a woman was available.

  Shortly before they reached the latitude of Angmagssalik, the wind let up, shifted to the east and brought in heavy fog. The ice pack slowly began to close with the shore, and the Arluk took to twisting slowly through the bergs in search of sea room. Nathan was becoming skillful at this and was better than anyone else at interpreting the glowing masses on the radar screen. Paul spent much of his time in his bunk, trying not to think of Brit, who was now only about twenty miles away, but the strong delicate hands with which she had held his head while she kissed him were impossible to forget. Unrequited love—that was a funny old-fashioned phrase, but he felt he had suffered that all his life before meeting Brit. Maybe not unrequited love, but unrequited passion, a sense of that had eaten at him during most of his nights with Sylvia. He didn’t blame his wife or tried not to, but there had been so many wasted nights, and without Brit, he might have died feeling that there was something badly the matter with him.

  It was a pleasure to dream of going back to Brit after the war. He could find a pilot who could fly him in a PBY into Angmagssalik. They would anchor the seaplane off the end of the wharf and Brit would come out to meet him in the launch. The first thing he’d do when he got ashore was tell off old Swanson, tell him never to go near the girl again. Then they’d fix up the little ketch enough to sail her to Newfoundland for a complete refit. After that the world, the South Sea islands, where the wind was always warm and there was no ice outside of a highball glass.

  As he thought about it, the dream began to appear like a practical plan, except maybe it would be better just to fly Brit out of Angmagssalik and buy a better vessel in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. Maybe he could get enough money together to build a boat especially for world voyaging. In Paul’s mind the design for such a vessel was quite clear. A yawl would be faster than a ketch on the wind and Brit would be good at helping him with the big mainsail. Why did he have to keep imagining Sylvia in tears? She would have her house in Wellesley, after all, and it wouldn’t take her long to find a man who really wanted to become her father’s helper in the banking business. No, Sylvia would not weep long, and after years of misery in Greenland, Brit would deserve a voyage to the South Seas with a man she loved. By that time he would deserve a few good years.… What route would they follow to the South Seas? The Panama Canal, the Galapagos, Cocoa Island and finally Tahiti—he had read a dozen accounts of small boats that had taken that route. They would rig twin head-sails that would make it unnecessary to touch the tiller in the tradewinds—Paul was so lost in his dream that it was hard for him to come back to reality when Nathan called from the bridge, “Skipper, you better come here.” Nathan did not shout, but there was a tone in his voice that jerked Paul from his fantasy and caused him nearly to leap from his bunk. Fog made only a small circle of gray water visible, and it was already getting dark. Nathan was peering into the hood of the radar set.

  “I think we got something here,” he said softly. “Whatever it is, it’s big and it’s moving.”

  “How far away?”

  “Twenty-three miles, bearing two five one degrees. He’s only about two miles off the edge of the ice pack. It looks like he’s following it north, on a course of about zero four five degrees.”

  “How fast?”

  “I can’t tell yet. Maybe about eight knots.”

  “Let me see.”

  At first Paul was confused by the glowing masses on the screen which were reflec
ted from the ice pack. Then he saw one small but bright blob that was crawling slowly like a luminescent bug across the glass so close to the ice pack that it seemed to be touching it. Automatically Paul went to the wing of the bridge to see it, but the fog was so thick that even the guns on the bow were only vague outlines.

  “Skipper, if we both maintain course and speed, he’s going to be about fifteen miles away when he’s abeam of us.”

  “Do you think he’s picking up our radar?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Can you tell whether he’s got radar?”

  “I’ve got Sparks working on it. He hasn’t picked up anything yet.”

  “Stop the engine,” Paul said, remembering his plan to remain hidden as long as possible. “If we stay here, how close will he pass us?”

  “About fifteen miles, if he holds his course. Shall I report this to GreenPat?”

  That obviously was the ship’s first duty, to spot enemy ships and report them. Still, in this fog aircraft could do nothing, and the radio could warn the Germans, if that’s what it was, even if Nathan was smart enough to avoid direction finders.

  “What are your chances of getting through to GreenPat without having him pick you up?”

  “Maybe fifty-fifty.”

  “Hold it for a while. Maybe it’s not a Kraut, maybe it’s one of our own cutters.”

  “They’d tell us if one of ours was headed up here.”

  “They’re supposed to, but there could be a screw-up. Look, you better report it to GreenPat. That’s doing it by the book.”